


In Dreams I See

by SomethingWitty



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Dreams, Happy Ending, M/M, Not quite a ghost AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomethingWitty/pseuds/SomethingWitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy is busy enough as a surgical resident, thank you, he does not have the time or the patience to deal with living in a haunted apartment. Don’t even get him started on the crazy dreams he’s been having about living on a spaceship, of all things. </p><p>Rating primarily for McCoy's potty-mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Dreams I See

He prided himself on his sense of skepticism. After all, one wouldn’t get too far in a medical career without a finely-tuned bullshit detector. Malingerers, drug-seekers, abusers…they’d all take you for a fool if you let them, and Leonard McCoy was no one’s fool. Some may have said that his few years in medicine had turned him into a misanthrope, but Leonard preferred to think of it as his education into human nature. Give everyone a short leash, and let the liars hang themselves with it.

Damn, that was cynical even for him. Leonard gave himself a shake, rolling his shoulders and neck, wincing as joints popped and muscles strained. He gave a forlorn little sigh as he thought of the tiny bottles of booze in the hotel fridge, calling out to him with their stupidly expensive prices. He was in the middle of his surgical residency at Mercy Center in Des Moines, Iowa and working himself into the dirt, living off granola bars and hospital coffee, the fucking breakfast of champions. Between the 80-hour work weeks and incompetent medical students, the last thing Leonard really needed at that point was for the entire living room suite of the apartment above his to come crashing right through the damn ceiling into his kitchen. The landlord had apologized to him profusely, but no amount of apologizing was going to keep the County Health Department from condemning the whole damn structure when the cleanup crew found black mold and dry rot in every nook and cranny. Leonard could feel his back tensing up again at the thought of it. So here he was, effectively homeless and living out of a hotel on the Great State of Iowa’s dime, and apparently he was supposed to be apartment hunting between his fourteen-hour shifts and his perpetual state of On-Call. Really?

It’s not like getting out the hotel would break his heart. The people in the room to his left were screwing like rabbits and loud as Hell (seriously, who actually moans that loud during sex?) with no respect for normal sleeping/waking hours and the people in the room to his right must be continuously high on pot, if the stench coming from under their door was any indication.

Leonard quickly skimmed the classifieds section of the local newspaper, eyeing the apartment listings as his finger swiped across the screen. He was a single guy – didn’t need much space – fuck if he was even at home more than he was at the hospital. He was also broke as Hell. Full-fledged Attendings may do pretty well in the salary area, but residents get a fucking pittance in comparison, and Leonard’s bank account reflected that. He was just about out of hope as he scrolled to the final listing of the classifieds, finger pausing over the letters.

2 BDR, 1.5 BATH APARTMENT, WASHER/DRYER HOOKUP AVAILABLE. $450 MONTHLY. NO PETS.

Now, as previously mentioned, Leonard McCoy was just about the most skeptical bastard you’d ever have the fortune to come across. He could smell a shady deal like a damn bloodhound, and this thing _reeked_. But all the other apartments listed were astronomically beyond his price range and his pile of bills really didn’t leave him much of a choice – he’d have to at least check the apartment out. For $450 a month it was probably a fucking shack.

A thud and an obnoxiously pornographic moan filtered through the thin wall from the hotel room next door.

Fuck it, he’d make an appointment with the realtor after his next shift.

\----

Well, it wasn’t a shack. It wasn’t even a shit-hole. He looked appraisingly at the long row of uniform-looking apartments all connected side-by-side with little front porches. It was nice, actually. New paint, clean white exterior with blue shutters, bushes and flowers lining the sidewalk.

He had gotten to the end of his shift at the Hospital without any major calamities and nobody bleeding out of their eyeballs, so his mood was actually on the up-and-up for once, and he found himself making small talk with the realtor. A quick flash out of the corner of his eye brought Leonard’s attention to a window on the second floor above the front door, where he caught a half-second flash of a face ducking behind a curtain, the only evidence left behind was the swish of white curtain.

Ok, not weird at all.

“So the rent on this place is really that cheap?” Leonard asked as they stood on the small porch. “Hell of a deal, if you ask me.”

The realtor, an Asian-American man about Leonard’s age named Hikaru, nodded enthusiastically as he swiped his access key into the port on the front door. “Absolutely. Your timing is great though, this place has only been open for a few days. Gonna get swooped up quick.” The light on the port flashed green and Hikaru pushed the door open to reveal a standard empty living room with an open kitchen and dining room directly behind it, and a steep staircase to the right.

Leonard started.

“I thought you said this place was unoccupied.”

“Yeah, it is.” Hikaru looked at him strangely, shifting his eyes around the clearly uninhabited living room devoid of any furniture.

“But I saw…” Leonard stopped himself. Maybe he was mistaken and the face in the window he’d seen wasn’t looking down from this apartment’s window. Maybe. But the window was right above the front door. “Nevermind. Must’ve gotten mixed up and saw one of the neighbors, I guess.”

Hikaru gave him that side-eye again, like he was trying to figure out where Leonard ranked on the psycho scale. “Sure. Ok, so the two bedrooms are upstairs and that’s also where your washer/dryer closet is going to be. Wanna go have a look?”

They made their way up the stairs and into a short hallway with three doors – two bedrooms and a closet. Leonard felt his feet pulling him to the bedroom facing the front, some part of him tensing up and ready to find someone hiding out in the room. He gave the door a push, keeping his feet in front of the threshold, ready to hoof it out of there if it there actually was someone in the room. The door swung open slowly, creaking on its hinges as it revealed a room just as empty as the rest of the apartment. There weren’t even the white curtains. Leonard shook his head and felt ridiculous; clearly he’d just caught sight of a nosy neighbor through their own window.

He and Hikaru toured the rest of the apartment, checking out utilities and appliances, and Leonard was almost surprised when everything passed muster. It really was, by all appearances, a clean and well-kept apartment for cheap.

“I’ll take it. Not much other choice, anyway.”

Leonard let out a breath and started to think that maybe karma was finally paying him back for all the bullshit he dealt with, like the bowel disimpactions, the Attendings with egos the size of the Titanic, the idiot medical students...

He should’ve known better.

\----

Leonard hadn’t even been in the apartment two days before the creepy shit started happening.

Of course _he'd_ be the one to end up renting an apartment with a poltergeist or something, and of course he’d have already signed a one year lease.

_Of fucking course._

He’d set things on the countertop and later find them in place he definitely had not left them. He’d walk down the hallway and swear, swear, there was breath on his neck, like someone was following just behind his back. He always felt watched, always.

This shit was not conducive to him getting his patient charting done, dammit.

And the cherry topping on the shit-pie was that the apartment was creeping him out and putting him on edge so much that even his dreams had become just plain bizarre. He was dreaming of monsters, creatures, and fucking aliens, of all things, all while flying across the galaxy like some ridiculous television show from his childhood. Except it felt real – the nausea that threatened to make him vomit as the floor vibrated under his feet, the pain of claws puncturing his shoulder, the stars rushing by at physically impossible speeds.

He even found himself day-dreaming during work, which was absolutely unacceptable. Not only was he a danger to patients if he let his mind drift, but his Attending was one cold and calculated motherfucker who would not hesitate to throw Leonard into the gnashing teeth of the disciplinary committee. Leonard did derive some small comfort from flinging thinly-veiled insults back at the other Doctor and his ludicrous bowl-cut.

Leonard put down the file he’d been making a half-hearted attempt at reading in his home-office and sat back into his chair. He gave himself a light slap to the cheek. “Get ahold of yourself, man.” He muttered and gave himself another slap to drive the point home, “Get a grip.”

“You know if you talk to yourself, people might think you’re crazy,” a man’s voice answered back.

The speed at which Leonard flung himself back from the desk and hit the floor elbows-first would’ve probably been hilarious if Leonard’s heart wouldn’t have been in his throat and pounding a fucking mile a minute. He looked around frantically for the voice of the man who was probably here to break into his house and kill him. He jerked his head left to right, scanning the room for where his to-be-murderer was lurking.

There wasn’t anyone there. He was alone in the room. Except he definitely fucking heard a voice, and unless Leonard’s brain had chosen that moment to develop auditory schizophrenia, he was definitely _not alone_. He’d never really put much stock in religion, but right at that moment he really found himself wanting a crucifix to swing at whatever ghoul-beast-phantasm had chosen his apartment to be its haunting ground.

“Who the hell are you?” Seemed to be the reasonable thing to ask to a fucking disembodied voice.

He waited for nearly a full minute of silence in return before he asked again. More silence.

Maybe schizophrenia was actually the more realistic case here.

\----

Life carried on. Leonard continued working unreasonable hours, but hell if he’d admit to it that for all his bitching and grumbling, he really did enjoy his work – even if people were, by far and large, crazy and/or moronic. Over time he got used to the clanking pipes, the bizarre dreams, the breezes from nowhere, the feeling of something feather-light touching his skin. The voice was there sometimes, too, and it was such a _smart-ass_ that Leonard had ceased to be afraid of it – had come to think of it as more of an annoyance, and boy did the voice had something to say when Leonard had vocalized that particular opinion. Generally he just did his best to ignore everything that was going on in his little apartment of horrors.

About a month after he moved in, he noticed the paint peeling off in chunks on the front of the apartment and the bushes turning brown. He frowned to himself and made a mental note to let the landlord know to send the handyman in. He made his way into the living room and set his things on the counter as he always did before going upstairs to wash off the sterile smell of the hospital that always seemed to soak into his clothes. He peeled off his scrubs and piled them onto the top of the closed laundry bin next to the sink before cranking the shower knob to just-near-scalding and stepping under the spray, letting the heat work the tension out of his neck and back, wincing as he rolled his left shoulder. His shoulder was always aching and sore and Leonard frowned to himself when he realized he couldn’t remember how he’d injured it, but he must’ve…somewhere. Lost in his thoughts, he worked his way through the water heater’s supply and the rapidly falling temperature of the water jerked him back to reality. He turned the knob to 'off' and grabbed his towel from the rack, quickly drying off. He wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped out of the shower, turning to face the sink to brush his teeth.

His hand never did quite get to his toothbrush, as it was busy reeling for balance when he instinctually jumped back from the sink and the mirror above it, steam-covered and foggy except for the clear areas where someone had thumbed in “BONES” into the condensation. Fucking hell. Leonard grabbed wildly for the nearest hand-towel and wiped the fog off the mirror with so much force it was a miracle he didn’t shatter it. He kind of wished he would’ve broken it, because then he wouldn't have noticed the man standing behind him.

Oh fuck.

“You do realize you’re naked right?” The smart-ass disembodied voice again (not so disembodied though, since the man in the reflection’s mouth moved almost in sync to the words), gesturing to the towel that had fallen off Leonard’s waist to his feet. “…Not that I mind, of course.” The man leered. _Leered_. Was that a fucking _eyebrow waggle?_

It was just Leonard McCoy’s life that he was butt-ass naked in his bathroom being hit on by a fucking mirror-man that may or may not be a figment of his imagination.

He should’ve stayed in the sex-and-drugs hotel. At least there he didn’t get sexually harassed by poltergeists.

Summoning every fiber of willpower he possessed to not run out of the room, Leonard braced his hands on the sides of the sink, never breaking eye contact with the other man …ghost? Dammit. There was something about his face that pulled at Leonard’s stomach, some kind of far-back forgotten memory that the man and his striking eyes were lighting up in Leonard’s brain, but trying to harness the memory was like trying to hold onto smoke, it just wisped through his fingers.

The man opened his mouth to speak and the words followed, but they were disjointed ever-so-slightly, like a video with the sound out of sync. “Hey there, Len.” His eyes were warm and a smirk played at the edges of his lips.

The terror and adrenaline rush were rapidly fading, being replaced by confusion and exasperation. “Who in the hell are you, anyway? You better actually answer me this time.”

The mirror-man dropped his gaze and sighed, shuffling from foot to foot in what almost looked like disappointment, smirk gone. “It’s okay. I’m staying here with you.” The man looked up again, meeting his eyes in the reflection. “I’m not gonna leave you alone. I'm here.” The bathroom lights flickered enough to shroud the room in darkness, and when the lights came back on full, the mirror-man had disappeared. And Leonard was still naked.

Reaching for the towel even though his skin had air-dried by now, he found himself staring back at the mirror, willing the man to show up again. No luck. He wanted answers, dammit. He changed into sweatpants and climbed into bed, fully knowing he was too wired to sleep but he had to be back at work in seven hours so he might as well make an effort to sleep, blue-eyed-mirror-ghosts be damned.

He’d almost succeeded when he suddenly jolted awake and realized where he’d seen the face – seen it almost nightly, in fact. This man had been in his dreams for the last month, calling him a stupid nickname and getting him into trouble and then out of it, sometimes horrifying, sometimes wild. Leonard closed his eyes and dug deeper for the vague and foggy dream-memories, recalling a tall and thin woman with fierce eyes but a kind smile, an excited kid in yellow spouting off math and physics equations gleefully...and the mirror-man pulling him along somewhere and grinning brighter than the fucking sun, toasting a glass of bourbon with a smirk, wriggling under him with a much more private smile and arms tightening about him.

Well, shit.

The man meant something to him, they all meant something to him, and if he just tried, he's sure he could remember...

Suddenly the pain in his shoulder returned with a sharp stab, and he bit back a yell as his entire shoulder seemed to seize. A crack like a window slamming shut resounded throughout the bedroom and in a flash Leonard could see a black haze hovering over his supine body, an extension of the haze pushing into the meat of his shoulder, digging and clawing. The longer Leonard stared up at it in the moonlit darkness, the more of it materialized, foggy edges becoming defined, scaly and serrated, mist forming into sharpened teeth, and red, angry eyes with slits like a snake staring him down as the thing clutched his shoulder with a clawed hand and shook him and _shit_ that _hurt_ fucking ow what the _fuck_ help.

As if some force heard his mental yell, and hell, maybe it was an actual yell, the black scaled creature gave an ungodly squawking howl as it was pulled upward into the ceiling by its tail, limbs and claws thrashing all the way. Leonard looked up and couldn't fucking move as he saw the mirror-man crouching into the corner where his ceiling met the wall, pulling the gnarled and twisting creature toward him, and Leonard was nearly sure now that he was dreaming this shit up, because seriously, a ghost vs. demon fight on his ceiling was so far beyond the bounds of what he considered weird. He wanted to tell them both to _fuck off_ , he had to go be a functional adult in the morning and needed to _sleep_. The window-cracking sound struck again, causing Leonard to flinch, and when he opened his eyes there was light in the room. Sunlight. He dropped his head onto the pillow and sighed into it, trying to convince himself he'd dreamed up the little parade of horrors that had just happened, but he knew better.

He had signed a yearlong lease.

A year of this shit.

Son of _a bitch_.

\----

Within the next few weeks Leonard started to notice issues around the apartment. The doors creaked with just the slightest motion, an angry, whining sound that felt like nails down a chalkboard. The water would sometimes take on a yellowish hue, and fuck no Leonard was not going to drink or bathe in that. The paint peeling on the front of the apartment had gotten worse, now showing through to the wooden slats of the siding, which themselves were buckling. One of the panes on a second story window had cracked. He'd called the handyman, a Mr. Scott, several times and got his voicemail every time. Leonard would've just taken matters into his own hands and fixed the loose shingles or noisy pipes, but his shoulder was in a state of perpetual bone-deep ache these days. It was getting hard to make it through long surgeries and his performance level was going down. Dr. Spock, the bastard, had even had the gall to suggest that Leonard stop taking on long surgeries.

The fog-creature from that night hadn't made a direct reappearance, but Leonard would catch dark flashes out of the corner of his eyes, would hear the slither-scraping of claws and belly on the second-story floors, would see the reflection of red snake-like eyes. On the other side of things, the mirror-man showed up with some regularity. He and Leonard would almost always have the same conversation as they had in the bathroom that night,

_Hey there, Len._

_Who are you? What’s your name?_

_I'm not gonna leave you alone. I'm here._

And the dreams didn't stop either. If anything they got more vivid - more vivid in a lot of ways. He could feel the coarse dirt of some alien planet on his knees as he hit the ground, could feel the delicious burn on his tongue of foreign herbs and spices, could feel the warm skin and blonde hair under his hands as he gripped tight on pale hips and pushed in and - he needed to redirect his train of thought. Suffice to say he was remembering _details_.

So here he was. Leonard McCoy, surgical resident, lessee to a haunted apartment, owner of a gimp shoulder, and escaping more and more to his increasingly lucid and realistic dreams.

He woke up one night, about three months after the move-in, to a hand carding through his hair. The mirror-man's eyes were bright in the relative darkness of the bedroom, and his hand felt more like a soft breeze than an actual touch. The man was wearing the same private little smile from Leonard's dreams.

"You gotta come back, Len." He said in an almost-whisper, "I know you're ready to come back."

Leonard frowned, a small part of his mind telling him to run the hell out of there, but the louder part of his mind telling him to stay. "I didn't go anywhere. I don't know what you're talking about."

The man sighed and the smile dropped off his face, and Leonard, damn him, felt something like guilt for making the man sad. Something so close to the surface but just under the water, so close, told Leonard that in another life he'd have done anything to keep this man from looking that unhappy. Something told him that he already _had_ gone to extreme lengths for this man. As if he could hear this train of thought, the man jerked his head up sharply to meet Leonard's eyes again.

"That's it! Keep doing that. Keep digging." The man said excitedly, eyes lighting up again, little crow’s feet appearing at the edges of them.

The walls around him groaned and creaked, and a chunk of the plastered ceiling fell to the floor with a pop and a thud. Rain began pattering at the glass windows. The man's arms circled around him, somehow more solid than his touch was just a minute ago. Several of the window panes blew in, spraying shards of glass into the room as something in the hallway slammed into the bedroom door.

"What _in the fuck_ is going on?!" He raised his voice over the din of wind and rain outside and the creaking of the house like it was falling apart around them, and the door banging, shit, Leonard could hear the scratching and scraping of claws and scales, and his shoulder was suddenly on fucking fire, and his breathing was too fast and he couldn't catch it and...

" _Bones_."

That name, spoken by that voice, cut through all the sound and the motion and the fear. He looked up into determined blue eyes, more-solid hands clutching at his sides and giving him a gentle shake.

"Bones, you need to wake up. This isn't real and you know it. You know it. Think about what doesn't make sense. This whole thing is a sham and you have got to snap out of it _right now_."

Not real? Of course it was real, it was his fucking life. His morning coffee was real. His car was real. The appendectomy he performed two days ago was real. He raised his hands to clutch onto the mirror-man's, finding him half-solid enough to properly grab onto. He stared at his own shaking hands, noticing for the first time a pale scar running over his forearm. He paused.

Leonard tried to remember where he’d gotten that scar, maybe some kind of athletic injury, but…he couldn’t remember what sports he played in high school and college. Actually – he shakily lowered himself back onto his bed, away from the man, deaf to the cacophony of the shaking house and snorting creature and howling wind around him – he couldn’t remember high school or college at all. He’d gone to school, yes, but where? What the hell came before Des Moines? For the life of him…he couldn’t remember what he’d done or where he’d been at all before the day he found himself in the doorway of his condemned apartment.

The walls of his bedroom cracked, spiderlike extensions running through the plaster sending little puffs of dust out with each new crack.

The pieces fell into place, and Leonard realized.

What in the _ever-loving fuck_ was he doing in Des Moines, Iowa? He'd done his surgical residency in Atlanta, almost ten years ago, back when he was married to...Jocelyn, and they had...god, Joanna. How could he forget Joanna? And the shit-storm that followed the divorce and the joke-of-a-custody-agreement which all led him to the bottom of a bottle and an 'I think these things are pretty safe' shuttle and the _Enterprise_ and...

"Jim." He finally choked out, fingers closing around strong biceps that were corporeal and real and solid, grabbing him in closer for a rough kiss.

"Finally!" was the response from the other man once they parted. He had an equally tight grip on Leonard's own arms, pulling him up off the bed. "As much as I’d love to have a make-out session, we have got to get the fuck out of dodge, Bones, or we're gonna end up Hth'wyc chow."

The creature (Hth'wyc, apparently) that had been banging into the door finally managed to break it down and proceeded to drag itself into the room, alternating between slithering and crawling on clawed limbs.

"Hey there, _asshole_." Jim said to it, putting himself between the Hth'wyc and Leonard, but keeping their hands connected. "We're done with your little brand of brain-fuckery so if you don't mind, we're gonna get out of here. And even if you do mind, we're _still_ getting out of here, so tough shit." Jim closed his eyes and a look of concentration passed over his face, hand still in Leonard's. "It's go-time, Spock. Vacation's over."

The creature had drool running down its fangs, eyes intent and focused on them. Jim's hand tightened around his own, and Leonard felt a pull at the back of his head not unlike the feeling of being transported. The last thing he saw was the creature as it reared back onto its haunches and in one deceivingly smooth motion propelled itself forward at them, claws out and jaw open as the last of the window panes shattered and the back half of the bedroom wall caved in on itself, exposing the interior to the battering rain and wind outside.

\----

Leonard woke with a gasp, pulling in air like he'd been underwater. The light shining in his eyes was too bright and the smells too intense, the rapid beeping of a heart monitor bringing him back to reality. He knew immediately, with that sound, that he was in sickbay. On the _Enterprise_ , thank God. He rapidly became aware of other things, such as the Vulcan hand on his face and the weight of Jim half-laying on Leonard's biobed, out cold and also having his face felt-up by Spock. _Vulcan_ Spock, not his supervisor Dr. Spock. He itched to knock the Vulcan's hand off him, but he was also smart enough to realize how bad of an idea that was. Turns out he didn't need to wait long anyway. Spock's eyes opened a moment later, his hands falling from both Leonard and Jim's faces, the latter man coming back to reality with a gasp and shake much like Leonard's own. Jim didn't seem to take as long to get his bearings though, as soon as he saw Leonard's eyes open the other man practically scrambled onto the bed so he was half-sitting on it, running his hands over Leonard's face and neck and shoulders (Leonard noted the heavy padding of gauze over his left shoulder), muttering nonsense and looking so shaken-up that Leonard realized how serious this must've been. He didn't even know what happened.

Jim made a distressed noise, "You got whammied by the mother of all hallucinogenic plants on Seti XIX. You've been out for four days, lost in your own brain somewhere because the plants are fucking carnivorous and wanted to _eat you_!" Jim shook himself, "And then the fucking Hth'wyc are, I guess, psychic predators, or something, we don't even know..."

Spock chose that moment to make good use of his Vulcan pragmatism. "As far as we can determine, the carnivorous plants, or 'Fwyl,' have evolved a symbiotic relationship with the Hth'wyc. The Fwyl poison and incapacitate the intended prey, letting the Hth'wyc devour the prey both physically and psychically, leaving behind easily-digestible remains for the Fwyl to consume. Our own difficulties with them aside, it truly is a remarkable evolutionary feat."

 _Vulcans_.

Jim sighed and shook his head, still half-lying on Leonard's bed. "What happened, Bones, is that we got you back on the ship before the Hth'wyc could do too much damage, well, besides to your shoulder there - sorry about that one. But anyway, turns out the Hth'wyc had already gotten into your brain, and you were whammied all to Hell thanks to the Fwyl. They built you your own reality and everything. Though why you'd want to have a fake reality where you're a surgical resident, I have no idea." Jim was rambling, a sure sign of how riled up he was because of all this. Leonard reached up to the other man's neck and held his hand there, applying gentle pressure, and the contact seemed to calm Jim down a bit. The privacy curtains were shielding the view of his bed to the other residents of Sickbay, and if Spock had an opinion on the demonstration going on in front of him, he clearly wasn't voicing it. Maybe the Vulcan wasn't so bad.

Jim cleared his throat and continued on, "So Spock here figured out that the only way to get you out of the fake reality the Fwyl built you was to make you realize it was fake, but that was the catch, you had to realize it yourself. I couldn't tell you right up front, at first. Spock used some kind of mind meld - I don't know, ask him, stop glaring at me, Bones. The more you started to realize, the more I could talk to you and the more the illusion fell apart - remember the peeling paint and the cracks in the walls? Unfortunately the more I interacted with you, the more the Hth'wyc could get to you, too, so we had to take it slow. Well, right up until the little finale there, of course. Turns out the Hth'wyc got really impatient for some McCoy roast and the little bastard was _not_ going to get any," Jim glared at the sickbay blanket as he was talking, looking like he'd love nothing more than to go find a Hth'wyc and kick it in the face. “So basically I had to, ah, accelerate the process and make you remember. _Bones_.”

Well.

Huh.

"I guess I should thank you...the both of you. I may not like the technique for getting me out of there, but you can't argue with results in this case." He was too tired to argue with a Vulcan right now anyway, thankfully Spock simply nodded at the show of gratitude and took his leave, walking with measured steps out of the sickbay. Leonard’s eyelids felt like they had little weights on them, and he felt the strong pull of sleep dragging him down. The biobed creaked a bit as Jim adjusted his weight on it, finding a position that wouldn't compromise Leonard's bandaged shoulder. Leonard tightened his right arm around the back of Jim's neck, pulling him closer to his own chest and neck, kissing the top of his head.

"Thanks, kid. For being there. I heard you, you know, all those times you told me that you'd stay and that I wasn't alone there. I might not have known who you were, but...it was better, in a way, to not be alone."

"Even if you thought I was a ghost?" He could feel Jim's lips pull into a smile against his skin.

Leonard was too tired to say anything back, so he just let a small smile of his own take over his face in return as he listened to Jim's ramblings.

"...a really _bangin’ hot_ ghost, obviously..." Jim whispered to himself and Leonard honest-to-god let himself snort out a chuckle. He pulled the other man closer once more, and the remaining tension fell off him as he sunk like a weight right to sleep.


End file.
